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Likelihood to Recommend

ActiveCampaign

For the small business who is just getting started or has a list smaller than 2,500 contacts, ActiveCampaign is a leader in smart communication. Compared with free (or cheap) alternatives like MailChimp or Constant Contact, the feature set provides a lot more value. The one real caveat here is that you have to really want to use the features. For someone who is happy to just send out their monthly newsletter, this might be more than you need.

Mautic Marketing Automation

It's bred from an open source product and is a nice little automation engine. The interface is clean and easy to use, but it definitely doesn't have the bells and whistles of a full-featured Marketing Automation platform like Marketo, Eloqua or Pardot. It's easy to stand up and run with a 1 person team. If you're looking to do simple web tracking, forms and landing pages, and email automation, it's a solid tool. If you like the idea of quickly being able to add focus items to your website it is also a great tool. Keep in mind it's new, and there will be bugs and issues here and there, but Mautic's support team was always very responsive and quick. I would consider both Mautic and Act-On to be "break-in" marketing automation tools, and Mautic stacks up. Not ready for prime time, but will definitely be an upgrade from simple email automation!

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCampaign is much cheaper, much less confusing, much less time-consuming. ActiveCampaign allows for templates to be shared easily. ConfusionSoft is so expensive and has unneeded setup time. For a software company, they are so frustratingly slow at helping set up your email automation and tracking. With ActiveCampaign you could be done setting everything up within 24 hours.

Mautic is the new kid on the block, bred from an open source product, we chose to purchase the hosted/supported version. I felt like it stacked up very well against Act-On and even Pardot. I like their data API push and pull with Salesforce - very quick, and the queue was synchronous and we never ran into problems with it. I think compared to Eloque and Marketo, it's definitely lacking features, although much easier to bite off and chew with a small team. We displaced Mautic with Marketo, but mainly because we needed more on the automation and integrations side of things. I think they will continue to make strides, especially on the integrations they have and support. Given how quickly they've come on the scene and have been competitive, I expect to continue to see great things from these guys. Even though we moved onward (we're a fast-growing software company), I would still recommend them!